10 Design Lessons from Nature

Mother Nature has her lessons for all of us. The same goes for the design world as well. Starting from colors, texture, balance, and consistency- designers take inspiration from nature. If you observe carefully, everything in nature is balanced with symmetry and beauty. She is the most simple yet complex designer we know. Needless to say, we can learn crucial design lessons from nature.

While creating a professional website, the main objective of a designer is to make it responsive, fully personalized, and allow the best user experience for all visitors.  And, they achieve so through colors, fonts, header and footer, layout, images, content, and other design elements. 

When it comes to these elements, a designer can implement those design lessons from nature to come up with a design that pleases users and stakeholders together. However, the problem is that most of us are stuck when it comes to emulating nature effectively. 

10 Design Lessons from Nature:

Function

Nature always focuses on its function and never compromises with it. This is a lesson for every designer. No matter if it is a web app or website or any product design, the objective of the design should be to improve the functionality of the item. Essentially, the design of a website or app should grab the attention of its target audiences, engage them, and get involved. A good design and functionality can enhance your conversion rates.

Consistency

Designers can learn to be consistent in their job by being inspired by nature. Consistency is a major element in giving the design a cohesive feel and look. We often hear designers talk about consistent navigation, page layouts, menu options, or control elements. In each case, the designer is looking for a way to leverage the usability of the interface by creating uniformity. 

Inspiration

Nature always inspires us to stay on track while being different and unique. When it comes to web design, a good design has to stand out from the crowd, inspire, and function seamlessly. As a designer, you should focus on the ethos or values instead of the products or services.

Balance and alignment

Think of the ecosystem, everything has balance and maintains alignments so as to not disturb other elements. Taking this lesson from nature, designers should maintain a balance and visual equilibrium in design. Web pages must have balance and alignment. From a good balance of text, graphics, media, and layout, everything contributes to making a web design perfect. An ideal balanced web page design grabs immediate attention and engages the visitors.  

Contrast

When we talk about contrast, Mother Nature is a perfect example of it. This is the fundamental principle that we should consider even in the UX UI designing world. The contrast in colors, shapes, graphical elements, sizes, and placing of each element can be rather eye-catching. Collecting those colors, shapes, sizes, and textures of nature and converting them into web design elements is interesting.

Colors

Colors always tell a story. The colors of nature are often lower in contrast with earthy shades. Color is the power that drives engagement. However, designers must learn from nature how to use colors in their designs to be easy on the eyes. 

Sustainability

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In terms of ecology, we know how biological systems stay varied and useful over time. A good design should fulfill the current needs as well as retain a presence and adapt to the future. It should be built in a way that makes it adaptable to change. 

Proportion

Every little detail that we see around us is wholly based on a series of rules- be it the Fibonacci series or the Golden Ratio. Nature provides us with pretty definite proportions. You can find The Golden Ratio everywhere to gain balance and coherency. Web designers should also honor these proportions and rhythms as important parts of the design. This will help designers to achieve a clear, comprehensible, and spontaneous UX UI design. 

Order

In nature, all life forms have cycles that do not change. This gives us a lesson that everything should flow logically. In web designing, designers should be logical in each UX decision; otherwise, visitors will experience discomfort. All the elements and contents ought to flow logically from one to the next. 

Connection of design elements

Everything created by nature is interconnected and depends on each other. When it comes to web designs, designers agree that each design element has a different purpose but, nonetheless, interdependent to develop an overall cohesive environment. 

In a nutshell, nature inspires, motivates, and helps us in the shaping of almost every aspect of our lives. It has many things to educate us and well-adapted and approachable design elements are just one of them. Designers can glean many design lessons from nature to make their designs more effective and beautiful.